The Impostor

Posted by: Vienta

A few months ago the lease I shared with my boyfriend “Sean” ran out and we decided to find another place to stay. We had previously been sharing a townhouse with a few other people, and were looking forward to getting a little lovenest of our own, made complete with the addition of our new cat. If you’re already gagging, take comfort in the fact that everything cute about this story was already summed up above. What remains of this tale recounts the most terrifying and viscerally disturbing and utterly wrong experience I’ve ever had. I’ll take it slow.

The apartment we settled on was one on the edge of town. It had recently been remodeled after being in disuse for a period of time. It smelled like someone had picked it out of a rack at K-Mart and looked like it was hecho’d en Mexico. Sean and I reasoned that the cheap remodeling probably accounted for the low rent that matched more dated local complexes.

Since we had a few days left on our lease when our move-in date rolled around, we took our time moving our possessions, and kept sleeping/bathing/eating at the old place. Finally the time came to make the big switch, and we piled all of our big stuff and our kitten into a truck and made the move final.

That night we both had trouble sleeping. It was pretty uncharacteristic for either one of us to feel uncomfortable in the dark, but after a bit of hesitation Sean couldn’t help but turn on the lamp beside our bed and comment that he was feeling a little weird. We discussed the bad juju feeling for a bit, and I remember remarking that the place somehow felt naked, as if we weren’t really in an apartment at all, but somewhere under the stars, open to the elements. I chalked this up to getting used to the new place. Still, long after Sean fell asleep I stared at the ceiling in the lamp light, hearing creaks and groans in the floor and expecting at any moment to find myself in a nightmare.

The next day I worked during the day and Sean worked the night shift. We didn’t get a chance to see each other between our shifts and I felt even more isolated in the apartment once I got home. Our cat, Jazz, made me feel a little better with her excitement and curiosity about our new place. With her around, it felt almost like home. Feeling a bit braver, I decided to shower.

Normally showers are not all that interesting. Most people just think of them as something they lose time to every day. Before that apartment I felt the same way. Didn’t ever think about it, just turned the water on scalding and stepped inside. Now just typing the word gives me the creeps.

That night when I took a shower I tried not to think about the uncomfortable feeling that place exuded I tried to focus on some happy thoughts. But I kept hearing things. A distant creak in the living room, a cupboard door closing, and then a strange thump on the floor just in front of the bathroom—it was starting to get to me. Soon, I noticed that my skin was covered in goose bumps. Thinking I was letting my imagination get away with me, I called to Jazz, hoping she would reply and raise my spirits.
From the bathroom doorway I heard a “Meow.” Something in my intestines lurched, and I felt a shock of adrenaline enter my blood. Was the water muffling Jazz in some strange way? The response from the doorway didn’t sound like my cat at all. Trying to control myself, I mewed gently, something I’d taken to doing when Jazz was still a kitten. The reply came again. Again, the sound was something odd. A different timbre. A different tone. A tiny crack in the vocalization. It came again, and it was wrong. All wrong, like something with twenty times the bodily resonation of my cat trying to impersonate her, trying to use her voice to plead for me to come out of the shower and into the open.

And it was closer than before.

I had a barrage of possibilities flooding my mind— the Meower, a meth head who had broken in and was now having a bit of fun before he raped and killed me. The Meower, a crazy creature from out of a “Spawn” comic. I could practically see it, a disgusting huddled mass at the threshold grinning insanely. And I was trapped.

Something inside of me, some hysterical thing from beneath my skin and struggling through my constricted vocal cords made my hand go to the shower curtain. Was it my imagination or my hand on fabric making the shuffling sound just outside of the shower? With a sickening succession of clacks shower curtain rings rushed to one side of the rod and I stood wet and completely vulnerable in the face of…

Nothing.

Before you start celebrating, I should point out that by “Nothing,” I mean exactly that. To my horror, I realized I had let Jazz outside before my shower. She hadn’t been in the apartment at all.

(Alright, I’m taking a break from this story for now. Even though I’m not in that apartment anymore it’s freaking me the hell out and I need to wait until daylight tomorrow to finish.)

As time went on, my fear—and somehow, memory– of this event dulled. It didn’t make any sense at all, and since Sean and I had similar shifts on most days I didn’t have to shower alone all the time. Within a week I had convinced myself that I had heard Jazz or some other cat through a window, and the distance had distorted the sound. Or something.

It sounded good enough to me at the time.

Then I began to notice the whispering. It would happen when I ran the tap. At first I thought it was “just pipes.” One evening I put my ear close to the wall where I knew the plumbing ran through and realized the whispering was coming from elsewhere. I left the tap on and tried to follow the sound.

I ended up in the middle room just off of the kitchen, at a closet that was built onto a wall. Desperately hoping that somehow the pipes snaked through the apartment and behind the closet, I opened the doors leading inside. Barely registering that the whispering had stopped, I choked back a wave of nausea caused by the rancid stench of rotting meat wafting out of the compartment. After I closed the doors, it took a moment to compose myself. I knew I hadn’t seen any meat in that closet. It was completely bare. Not to mention, when I closed the doors it seemed to completely disappear. To make matters worse, I could once again hear a low whispering from the closet. Preparing for the worst, I opened the doors again.

Nothing.

The smell was gone. Truly wondering if I was crazy at that point, I woke Sean up from a nap. I took him over to the closet and had him listen. By that time, the tap water running in the kitchen sink had gone from hot to tepid. Confused and bleary-eyed, Sean walked with me to the closet. Only now the whispering was gone.
Before I could even open my mouth to explain, Jazz darted past us from the bedroom where Sean had been sleeping and cowered in a corner, her huge pupils fixed on a window by our bed. Looking where her gaze was directed, I froze and felt again that shower-terror I had a week ago.

A human silhouette crouched on our balcony. Its outline was barely discernible against the black of trees and night, but what was terrifying, truly terrifying, more than the fact that someone had spooked our cat, more than the fact that someone was looking through our bedroom window, more than the fact that some large thing the color of the very void itself was on our balcony, were the eyes. The tapeta lucidum eyes that glowed like a cat’s as our bright kitchen shone on them. The eyes that gazed inward at us without emotion or apology. They were dead eyes, but impossibly alive with light at the same time. I was transfixed, completely. In that moment Sean and my cat might have been on different planets. Fear had begun to flex its muscles, and every muscle in me seemed to stop. Those fucking eyes.

And then it was gone. The shape slid away into darkness. I heard no sounds of running, only a tiny whisper of what might have been fabric or breathing as the shadow disappeared. Its eyes were on mine even as it swayed out of sight.

I turned to Sean, every hair on my body standing on end. I wasn’t trying to speak, but words came out anyway.

“Did you see that?” I felt like I was in a dream.

Sean turned to me, from where he was examining the closet. He could see I was upset and looked to the bedroom, where my finger was pointing, again, nearly without my knowledge of it. “See what?”
It seemed impossible, but Jazz and I were the only two witnesses to the thing in the window. To this day, Sean still claims that he was only looking in the closet for two seconds after the cat ran into the room with us and before I asked him if he had seen what I’d seen. For me, it had seemed like minutes.